Do babies understand words?
Moment of Um
American Public Media
4.4 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Babies. They’re cute little peanuts, huh? Babbling and drooling while their parents talk to them in widdle baby voices. But do babies understand what people say to them? When do they start learning how to communicate with language? We asked child psychologist Dr. Beverly Goldfield to help us find the right words to explain the answer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From the brains behind brains on, this is the moment of um. |
| 0:08.1 | Moment of um comes to you from APM Studios. I'm Anna Goldfield. |
| 0:13.0 | Um. I love words. Little words and big words, from bug to behemoth, from dot to dodecahedron. |
| 0:23.7 | I love descriptive words like incandescent and odiferous. |
| 0:28.9 | I love anatomatiic words that sound like the action they're describing. |
| 0:32.7 | Pow! Zap! Zip! Bang! Splat! |
| 0:36.4 | My brain is buzzing with syllables and phrases and paragraphs. |
| 0:41.1 | But how did all those words get into my noggin in the first place? |
| 0:45.2 | When do we first start understanding that words are sounds with meaning? |
| 0:49.6 | We got a question from listener Evie who wondered, |
| 0:52.6 | Do babies understand what their family is saying to them? Don't worry, Evie. I got you question from listener Evie who wondered, Do babies understand what their family is saying to them? |
| 0:56.0 | Don't worry, Evie. |
| 0:57.1 | I got you. |
| 0:58.2 | We're going to talk to the person who taught me my first words, my mom. |
| 1:04.5 | Oh, do babies understand words? |
| 1:07.4 | That's a very, very interesting question. |
| 1:16.9 | And the short answer is yes. Babies do understand words, but not until they are about six months of age. My name is Beverly Goldfield, and I teach |
| 1:26.6 | psychology courses at Rhode Island College. I'm also director of the |
| 1:32.8 | Rhode Island College Infant and Child Lab, and this is where we do research on early language |
| 1:40.4 | development. Starting around six months, some of the things that their brain has been able to do, |
| 1:49.3 | and some of the things that the people who talk to them have been doing, |
| 1:54.8 | begin to have an impact, and they begin to understand single words in this stream of speech that they've |
... |
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